Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Ellie had said, that mug of tea nudging her tits, that he could do it now — they could do it now. When she spoke, the ‘he’ kept slipping into ‘they’, as if the words were almost the same thing, or as if what he alone might have hung back from ever doing was a different matter once the ‘he’ changed to ‘they’.

And now, of course, he’d seen the letter that Ellie had been waiting all that time to show him. Though it was so sudden for Jack that for a brief while he’d wondered if the letter was real, if it wasn’t some trick, if Ellie might have written it herself. The letter wasn’t just their way out, it was ‘cream on the cake’ (Ellie’s phrase). Uncle Tony — from beyond the grave — was offering them not just a rescue plan, but a whole new future ‘on a plate’ (Ellie’s phrase again). They’d be mad not to grab it.

So there was a plate with a cake on it with cream on top. And here they were taking tea at Jebb.

If they sold up — in the way Ellie was proposing — they’d wipe out the debts and have money to spare. They might even have, courtesy of Uncle Tony, a little money to burn. Or … they could stay put and each be the proud and penniless owners of massive liabilities.

There was a third and not so far-fetched option (not nearly so far-fetched, in Jack’s mind, as the Isle of Wight), which Ellie didn’t mention and Jack didn’t mention either. If he was going to mention it, he should have mentioned it a whole lot earlier, but the time for mentioning it was past.

And of those two options starkly presented to him by Ellie, was there any choice? Couldn’t he see, she’d said, sensing his at least token resistance, his getting guilty in advance, that there was such a thing as good luck too in the world, such a thing as the wind for once blowing their way? And, Jesus, Jack, hadn’t they served their time and been patient long enough?

Through the window before them, the crown of the oak tree had stirred in the sunshine and seemed to offer consent. People would pay, Ellie had said, for a view like that. They’d pay. The dairy consortium couldn’t give a damn. They’d think of the cost of having that tree taken out.

It seemed to Jack that Ellie had certainly picked her moment — a day when all that he was now the master of had never looked so fine — to tell him it was time to quit. She might have picked, instead, some bleak day in February. And she’d never looked so fine, like a new woman even, herself.

But Jack knew that this new (but not unrecognisable) Ellie hadn’t just sprung up, in her daisy-dotted dress, overnight, or even with the warm summer weather. She’d started to appear, to bloom even the previous year, after Michael had caused that hole in the tree and when they’d found out soon afterwards the contents of his will. Yes, for what it was worth, he was sole lord and master now.

And she’d bloomed a bit more, he thought, when later that winter and into the spring, Jimmy — tough-as-thistles Jimmy Merrick — had become ill. Slow but one-way ill, a bit like Luke. His liver and his lungs. Both things, apparently. The worse Jimmy got, in fact, the better, in some ways, Ellie looked. Then in May Jimmy had been hospitalised and — whether it was the shock of being away from the farm where he’d spent all his life or whether, seeing how things were going after the cattle disease, he’d simply been ready to give in — he’d succumbed pretty soon.

And Ellie hadn’t stopped blooming, as was now very clear. But then she’d have had cause to bloom, despite having a sick dad to nurse, if she’d had that letter up her sleeve all the while. It was dated mid-January. For six months she hadn’t breathed a word. That was all, in one sense, entirely understandable. What point in sharing that letter with anyone, so long as Jimmy, ailing as he was, was master of Westcott Farm and she was in his thrall?

Jack didn’t say anything to Ellie — though he came very close — about the length of time she’d kept the letter to herself. He understood, anyway, that he was now in Ellie’s thrall. (But hadn’t he always been?) He felt the letter taking away from him any last argument, any last crumb of Luxton pride or delusion. Mastery? He was in Ellie’s hands now. ‘They’ not ‘he’. He knew that keeping the farm, for all its summer glory, was only a picture. Ellie had stuck her finger through it. Now she was pointing to their future.

He’d dipped his face to his mug of tea, but looked at that view.

‘Cheer up, Jacko,’ Ellie had said. ‘Lighten up. What’s there to lose?’

He might have said that everything he was looking at was what there was to lose.

Ellie stroked his arm. ‘People leave,’ she said. ‘People go their own way and take their chances.’ Then she added, ‘My mother did.’ As if she might have said: ‘And didn’t she come good?’

Then she said, in her way, the thing he should have said, in his way, first. The thing he should have got in first, and differently.

‘And so did Tom.’

He didn’t say anything to this. He was trying to work out the answer. The word ‘Tom’ was like a small thud inside the room. But Ellie got in first again. She looked at him softly.

‘If he cared, Jack, if he wanted his stake, he’d have been in touch by now, wouldn’t he? If he can’t be bothered to tell you where he is—’

‘He’s a soldier, Ell.’

‘So? He went his own way. Now we should go ours. I don’t think you even have to tell him that you’re going to sell.’

There was a silence while the house, filled with summer breezes, seemed to whisper to itself at what it had just heard.

‘Forget him, Jack. He’s probably forgotten you.’

Tom wasn’t dead then, Jack thinks now, even if neither he nor Ellie knew where he was (Tom’s Service Record would one day tell Jack that he was in Vitez, Bosnia), but it was as though at that moment, Jack thinks now, he might have been.

Then Ellie had switched the subject brightly back.

‘Anyway, have you any idea how much a house — just a house, no land — in some parts of London can cost these days?’

Jack had no idea, and he didn’t like the sudden, alarming implication that he and Ellie should buy a house in London. Hadn’t they just been talking about the Isle of Wight?

‘No. Why should I?’

Ellie had floated a figure across him that he’d thought was crazy. Then she’d said, ‘And have you any idea how much some people in London who can afford that kind of money will pay, on top, for their own away-from-it-all place in the country? Just to have that view’—she’d nodded towards the foot of the bed—‘from their window?’

Jack didn’t know how much, though in one sense it seemed to him that the view from the window, which was simply the view that went with the house, didn’t and couldn’t have any price on it at all. How could a view that didn’t really belong to anyone even be for sale? And when Ellie mentioned another figure, again he’d thought it was crazy.

Later on, when he did find out what people — specifically the Robinsons — really were prepared to pay for that view and all that came with it, he’d think it was strange that he’d lived for twenty-eight years in a place that might be so prized as an ‘away-from-it-all place’, but now he, or rather ‘they’, wanted to get away from it.

And sitting now by the window at Lookout Cottage, looking out at what, in less obscuring weather, might be thought of as another priceless view, Jack is of the firm opinion that the place known as ‘away from it all’ simply doesn’t exist. He happens to have some idea roughly how much Lookout Cottage might currently fetch. But how little he cares about that.

‘Throw in Barton Field,’ Ellie had said, ‘throw in that oak, and they’ll think it’s their own little bit of England.’